ELEVEN
The next day I plugged in my film library for the first time in months. I had to believe Spanner about the hole in the pattern; that was her job. My job was to create a short commercial that would be indistinguishable from the real thing; one that would persuade the rich to part with their money—and do it fast enough for us to get off the air, get the money out of the account, and disappear before net security could work out that their signal had even been piggybacked.
What would work best, I had decided, was an appeal based on charity to older people, those Tom’s age or thereabouts.
Those born before 1960 had the hardest time adjusting to change. They were the ones who would suddenly stop in the middle of the street as if they had vertigo when some shopwindow flared and called out, or get that haunted, bewildered look when the PIDA readers changed again, or the newstanks swapped to a different format.
It was a very specific expression: hollow-cheeked, eyes darting, looking for somewhere to hide. I had seen that same look on the faces of war refugees, or the foreign-speaking parents of native-speaking children. Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change, not like us.
I needed a thirty-second feature—but the real punch had to be in the first eight of those seconds. I needed to know what was going on in the world of commercial net entertainment.
I took breakfast into the living room and ate while I flipped through the offerings: a two-hour docudrama about a woman and her child fending off urban predators in a burned-out Sydney tenement; a lot of breathy pseudonews; an interactive version of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
. I watched that one for a while, fascinated at how the original film was utterly destroyed by turning it into a game, then finally settled down to a modern version of Shakespeare’s
Othello
. I only needed to watch about twenty minutes to see how visual fashions had changed in the months since I had left Spanner.
What seemed to be in favor was a kind of neomodernism, a fascination for details and emphasis on texture. What I had in my library would not be good enough. Oh, there were some tricks I could play: I could redigitize chunks of it, in effect reshooting frames to give the footage a “live” feel, enabling me to make the pans slower than the original, the focuses more lingering. But I would need to do some recording of my own. For that I would need a model.
I sipped at my tea. Maybe Tom would be interested.
I turned the screen off and stared out of the window. The sky looked the same today as it might have done a hundred years ago, or a thousand, or fifty thousand. I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a community that stayed more or less the same, from birth to death. To be able to reach ten, or twenty-five, or fifty, and think,
There, I’m not going to learn any more. I know enough to live my life.
Magyar stayed out of my way for the next few days, but I caught her eyeing me speculatively once or twice and knew that this was merely an undeclared truce; she had not given up. With the systems back up and the two extra bodies, it was almost relaxing.
I whistled as I transferred the figures on the board to a slate.
Paolo came into the readout station. “What does that readout there mean?”
“I thought you were trimming back the rushes on forty.”
“All done.” I looked. They were. He pointed to the green numbers again. “What does that measure?”
His limbs were still stiff, still carefully nowhere near touching me, but the expressionless mask that usually curtained his face had parted, just a little. It was like watching an anemone uncurl and expose its mouth, delicate and beautiful. “Nitrogen. In various forms.”
“What’s the difference between the kinds?”
It would have been so easy to shrug, profess ignorance, and just go about our work routine, anonymous and safe, but he was leaning forward, peering, reaching out to touch. He might never ask for something so simple, so hard to give, again. And if those tentacles tightened once more they might never loosen. So I pointed. “Nitrites, free nitrogen, ammonia. Then various subdivisions. But they’re not as important.”
“Show me again. More slowly.” I did. He nodded after each one. His lips moved as he repeated the names to himself.
“Paolo, do you want to learn?”
He shrugged guardedly. “Sure.”
I had thought his eyes were soft, but they weren’t. They were hard, like the thick brown ice that collects over muddy puddles, the kind you think you can see through until you really look.
I don’t trust you,
those eyes said.
I’ve been played with before.
I shrugged back. “The more you know, the easier life is. I can teach you, if you like.” I hoped I could, anyway. I had been the youngest child, smallest sibling; always the student, never the teacher.
I think he knew I didn’t feel as casual as I looked; he wasn’t stupid. But maybe it was the fact that I was willing to pretend that made him decide to take the risk. He nodded.
“After the break, then.” When Magyar took her own rest.
After the break I took him into the concrete bunker. I pointed to the red button Magyar had used a few weeks ago, feeling a little self-conscious. “I can’t slide back the floor to show you just how much water is pouring in here every minute, but believe me, four and a half million gallons a day is a lot.”
The numbers obviously meant nothing to him.
You can do this,
I told myself. “Try to imagine a hose as big around as a pregnant woman squirting green or orange water polluted with all kinds of dangerous and unpleasant guck at high pressure into an empty swimming pool. When the pool reaches a certain depth, the water starts to pour out the other end, so eventually you get the water roaring out the other side as fast as it pours in. Now imagine that it’s an enchanted pool, that somehow during its time in there, the water is changed from stuff that will kill you to clear, clean, crystal drinking water, and that water goes straight into the mains, where old men and little children drink it from the tap. It might not sound like much, but there are two things to remember. The water in that fat hose never, ever stops. And, most important, we—you and me and Cel and Kinnis and Magyar and all the others—are the magic. If we screw up or stop working, people die.”
Shock, in Paolo, was a strange turning of his arms and a blank cast to his face. I watched him struggle with the idea of all that responsibility. “But what about the machines, the failsafes?”
“They work well enough, most of the time. But if the systems go down again, or if someone misreads the alarms, or there’s an aberration so momentary that the sensors miss it at the influent point, then it’s up to us. And that’s just assuming that the problem is something the designers have anticipated. And that it’s accidental.”
“Sabotage?” He blinked. “How could someone sabotage this place?”
“Any number of ways, but the best place would be right at the beginning—close the whole train down.”
“The influent?”
“Right here.” I pointed at the floor, which shook very slightly with the vibration of the water flowing beneath us. “Put something big or lethal in there and, assuming the systems catch it in time, they’ll close everything down. If they don’t catch it at once, then the contamination will go on through to the whole of the primary sector and pollute four or five million gallons. And then there’s human error.” I showed him the spigot, the initial test readouts—all automated—the various lights that indicated what bacteria and algae were currently being used, their estimated biomass and suggested nutrients. “Depending on what’s coming in, we add biomass, or change it, or decrease nutrients. So if we get an influx of something nasty that kills selected strains, we can re-add. Or if some strain is struggling, we can add preferred nutrients or decrease the nutrients of the strain that’s proliferating too much and suffocating the desired strain. The initial readouts here, and then the ones I give to Magyar, determine what amount of which strain is needed.”
I led him out of the concrete bunker. “It’s important to understand the general principles.” I stopped by trough forty-one. “Looks like the gravel here needs reraking. You start at that side.” We pulled on our masks and got to work. I waited until we had both established our rhythms. “What did you learn from the orientation video?”
He pulled himself straight, as though this was a school test.
“Keep working. Magyar won’t be on her break forever.”
“Oh. Well, undifferentiated waste comes in there,” he pointed with his chin back to the bunker, “where it’s churned up to mix the solid waste into the liquid. Then the slurry is split into eighty treatment streams and piped into the troughs. That’s where bacteria change some of the more poisonous nitrogen compounds into less poisonous ones.”
I was impressed. “You picked up a lot from the orientation video. But the troughs do more than start the denitrification process. They also begin the biodegradation of some of the other substances. Go on.”
“The surface water is siphoned off to the next stage, to those big tanks, the transparent ones, where it’s busy and noisy and hot.”
“The silos are kept at over forty degrees Celsius—forty-four to be exact—for the mesophilic bacteria that do all the work at that stage.” It felt good to talk about specifics after so long. “And the water’s kept in violent motion—spiral jet mixers, coarse bubble diffusers—to eliminate stagnation and prevent liquid stratification, always likely with heated water. And it helps to keep those solids suspended.”
He pulled down his mask to get more air. It was hard to work and talk and get enough oxygen through the filters all at the same time. “You know a lot.” Faintly challenging. His look around—at the rakes, the troughs, the stinking brown smear on my plasthene-coated thigh—was clear.
If you know so much, how come you shovel shit like the rest of us?
I was not in the mood to play games. “You don’t know me, or why I’m here. I don’t know you. But I’ve decided to trust you, anyway. And you can learn from me.” I needed him to trust me. I needed to help him. I needed, just this once, to feel good about myself.
My bluntness disconcerted him. He raked away at the gravel for a while. I was content to just do my work, too, and let him think.
Eventually, he stopped. I stopped, too, and waited. “I thought that water treatment was all about separating the sludge from the liquid. But. . .” He shrugged, and I noticed again how graceful he was, but how that grace stopped short of his arms and legs. A vague memory of some hotel room and Katerine on the screen scooted almost within reach, then disappeared.
“That’s the way it used to work, when the solids were going to be buried or just spread around in fields to dry and decompose as best they could and be carted out to sea in barges. Here, they’re actually used. Once at the tertiary stage and beyond, the algae, moss, and duckweed use the nutrients in the sludge. The moss is taken away and recycled for the heavy metals consolidated in it, but the algae and duckweed are eaten by snails and zooplankton. The snails are harvested and added to the next stage—where they’re eaten by the bass and tilapia and minnows. The fish add to the solid waste, of course, but in a form readily used by the lilies. Except in the primary sector, where the air scrubbers take out some of the more toxic gases, everything that’s produced is used to increase production of something else. That’s the beauty of—” I broke off and pulled my mask back up. Magyar was heading our way.
Her stride was stiff and fast, and even from here I could see the muscles in her jaw clenching and unclenching. My PIDA might be safe, but something had obviously happened to make Magyar very, very angry. I steeled myself, but Magyar walked right past. Her rage radiated from her like heat.
I wasn’t the only one who had noticed. Kinnis looked over from his trough and shrugged elaborately. I wondered what was going on.
I spent the rest of the shift alternately looking over my shoulder and telling Paolo about the delicate ecological balance of the plant.
“The snails and the plankton reproduce at a rate directly proportional to the amount of algae available, but the zooplankton is far more susceptible to metals than the diatoms, so the proportions are constantly in flux. The algae have to be monitored very carefully, and in conjunction with the moss and metal uptake.”
It was a beautiful system. Every time I arrived at the pseudo-Victorian monstrosity that was this building, I was amazed that such a pile of metal and stone and glass and electricity could facilitate such a miracle: fish and flowers and shrubs from sewage and deadly chemicals. Sometimes I wasn’t ashamed of my family and how they earned their money.
I might be doing a low-grade job, but what I had said to Paolo was true: We made a difference. And it didn’t have to be just in the general sense. By taking the risk of talking to Paolo, even just a little, I was making a difference to him and his life, teaching him things that he could use or take with him wherever he went. Seeing the change in his face, those unguarded moments, made a difference to me, too. It made me feel as though I was doing something worthwhile. I hadn’t felt that way for a long time.
The only smudge on the horizon was Magyar. I wondered what had happened to anger her so much. My PIDA was safe. Spanner had fixed it. Hadn’t she? But if Magyar was as smart as I thought, then no matter how my PIDA matched my height, weight and DNA, she would know I wasn’t Sal Bird, aged twenty-five, the line-worker grunt from Immingham. She would keep checking, keep digging. And a PIDA could not protect me against a personal call to Bird’s last job site, a chat with the supervisor . . .
If I could just explain to Magyar what the job meant to me. Tell her about Paolo, how good I felt to be teaching him. How much easier life would be for me, for all of us, if we just let down our guards a little and talked, helped each other. Maybe I should try trusting her the way Paolo was trusting me.
I waited for her outside. Fog condensed on the streetlights and dripped onto the pavement. Even here in the city, the night smelled of autumn: damp leaves mulching, wood smoke, wool coats slightly musty from six months in the closet. Ten minutes became twenty, then half an hour.